A
New York Times
Notable Book and a Best Book of the Year at
Esquire,
Seattle Times
,
Minnesota Star Tribune
Huffington Post
, and
Publishers Weekly
. From “quite possibly America’s best living writer of short stories” (NPR),
Ninety-Nine Stories of God
finds Joy Williams reeling between the sublime and the surreal, knocking down the barriers between the workaday and the divine.
Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist Joy Williams
has a one-of-a-kind gift for capturing both the absurdity and the darkness of everyday life. In
, she takes on one of mankind’s most confounding preoccupations: the Supreme Being. This series of short, fictional vignettes explores our day-to-day interactions with an ever-elusive and arbitrary God. It’s the
Book of Common Prayer
as seen through a looking glass—a powerfully vivid collection of seemingly random life moments. The figures that haunt these stories range from Kafka (talking to a fish) to the Aztecs, Tolstoy to Abraham and Sarah, O. J. Simpson to a pack of wolves. Most of Williams’s characters, however, are like the rest of us: anonymous strivers and bumblers who brush up against God in the least expected places or go searching for Him when He’s standing right there. The Lord shows up at a hot-dog-eating contest, a demolition derby, a formal gala, and a drugstore, where he’s in line to get a shingles vaccination. At turns comic and yearning, lyric and aphoristic, Ninety-Nine Stories of God serves as a pure distillation of one of our great artists.